Another vote for this combination. Add the ffdshow codec library and you can play just about any video you’re likely to come across, without installing dozens of annoying individual codecs.
Autostitch is a great little program for taking a series of digital images and turning them into a panorama. Here is an example of a panorama i took a few months ago at a hotel outside of Amenia, NY.
For quick editing, joining, splitting, and encoding of mpeg and avi files, you need VirtualDub (avi) and TMpgEnc (mpg).
While i don’t have my own website and don’t need an uploading ftp client, i use SmartFTP to download from ftp sites like archive.org. It allows me to control bandwidth use so that i can download large files and still browse the internet.
I use Skype to make long-distance phone calls within North America and to friends and family in Australia.
I use a bunch of other free stuff (Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, Audacity, etc.) that has already been mentioned in this thread.